Generally described, an Internet telephony system provides an opportunity for users to have a call connection with enhanced calling features compared to a conventional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) based telephony system. In a typical Internet telephony system, often referred to as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), audio information is processed into a sequence of data blocks, called packets, for communications utilizing an Internet Protocol (IP) data network. During a VoIP call conversation, the digitized voice is converted into small frames of voice data and a voice data packet is assembled by adding an IP header to the frame of voice data that is transmitted and received.
VoIP technology has been favored because of its flexibility and portability of communications, ability to establish and control multimedia communication, and the like. VoIP technology will likely continue to gain favor because of its ability to provide enhanced calling features and advanced services which the traditional telephony technology has not been able to provide.
In some instances, there is a need to efficiently broadcast messages to a large group of users via VoIP communication channels. However, it is not an easy task for a message broadcaster to decide which devices associated with each user will be contacted for the broadcast messages since a user may have different kinds of devices with various levels of functionality and capability. For example, some simple VoIP devices can process voice messages but not video messages due to lack of necessary applications or functionality to process video data. Even if some VoIP devices can process video data, the VoIP device may lack the capacity to receive a large sized file, or may not have a display unit suitable for the video data. If a broadcast message is transmitted to a VoIP device which does not have the necessary applications or functionality to process or to receive it, the broadcast message may not reach the user. Consequently, such transmission may waste the resources of the receiving user, the VoIP device, and the message broadcaster. Current VoIP approaches may not provide message broadcasters with the ability to select an appropriate device based on the format of a broadcast message.